Lesson 9 of 12
Kana Sprint 9 — holding the vowel
about 5 minutes
After this lesson you can
- Read ー as a doubling of the vowel before it.
- Read おう and えい as long vowels in hiragana, where no ー appears.
- Read the difference between a short and a long vowel in a minimal pair, and count the beats in each.
Words this lesson teaches
- ケーキ
- cake — ke-e-ki, three beats
- スーパー
- supermarket — su-u-pa-a, four beats
- ビール
- beer — bi-i-ru. ビル, three beats shorter by one, is an office building
- せんせい
- teacher — se-n-se-e, written with い and read as a held e
- ノート
- notebook — no-o-to
What it explains
A long vowel is two beats, not a different sound
English lengthens vowels by changing their quality — the a in cat and in car are different sounds. Japanese does not. おばさん and おばあさん have the same vowel; the second one holds it twice as long. That is the entire difference, and it carries meaning, so it has to be produced and heard rather than approximated. Count it: おばあさん is five beats, o-ba-a-sa-n.
Two systems for one job
Katakana uses ー, a plain bar, and it works after any vowel: ケーキ, スーパー, コーヒー. Hiragana has no such mark. It writes a long o as おう and a long e as えい, which is why きょう is kyoo rather than kyo-u and せんせい is sensee rather than sensei — the spelling shows two characters and the sound is one held vowel. A few hiragana words use おお instead of おう, おおきい among them, and those are learned individually.
The bar in vertical writing
Written down the page rather than across, ー turns and becomes a vertical stroke. It is the same mark doing the same job. Worth knowing before the first menu or shop sign you meet set vertically, because a vertical bar next to a katakana character looks like nothing you have been taught until you know what it is.